Thank God For Pat, Ray and Ric’
Sleepy Brown f/ Big Rube – “Bending Corners”
Sleepy Brown f/ Big Gipp – “Can’t Give It Up“
from Phunk-O-Naut (Dreamworks, Unreleased, 2004)
Lil Will f/ Cool Breeze & Pimp C – “Low, Low“
from Betta Days (Organized Noize/Interscope, Unreleased 1998)
The Dungeon Family catalog is infectious in the most literal sense. You listen to one record and then all you want to do is revisit their entire catalog. I can’t tell you how many afternoons I’ve wasted spent running the first three Outkast albums in a row and then going straight into the first two Goodies. Obviously yesterdays out of nowhere future classic (?) has inspired a similar streak, though I’ve been going deeper into their unheralded r&b productions. So here are a few unreleased soul joints from the ONP camp with good rapping on them.
Phunk-O-Naut would have been Sleepy’s sophomore effort, but it got devoured by the Dreamworks machine. It seems like Sleepy loosely predicted/influenced that breezey soul pop that’s been gaining steam in the wake of “Sexual Seduction” and Shawty Redd’s “Drifter”. (I guess their calling it “vibe music,” but I haven’t heard that term anywhere but on message board and blogs).
A few weeks back I got clowned by a certain magazine editor slalf hash blogger when he asked what I thought of Lil Will and I started gushing about the unreleased Betta Days. Turns out he was talking about this guy, who I had already forgotten (and probably doesn’t have a Pimp C verse).
March 21st, 2008 at 12:53 pm
i’ve been jonesing for betta days for quite some time…
that ever end up on the message board?
March 21st, 2008 at 3:24 pm
and co-sign – the people have a right to hear ‘betta days’.
March 21st, 2008 at 6:59 pm
from the looks of that pic, i thought you were gonna cover common, i’m glad you didn’t.
March 22nd, 2008 at 7:11 am
^But Sleepy always wears those bug-eyed alien style sunglasses, that’s how you tell the difference.
I haven’t paid much mind to Sleepy’s solo stuff, precisely to the day a couple years back him and Pharell (and Snoop?) had that abortion of a single with the video of them flailing their arms around on some blue-screen island. That’s also the point I figured that he is much better keeping it to guest spots and hooks and such.